The Lemon Orchard Read online

  She listened, feeling chills.

  “I got picked up,” he said. “By the Border Patrol.”

  “But didn’t you tell them about her? Wouldn’t they have gone back to get her?”

  “At first no one believed me—thought I was lying to distract them, maybe escape, I don’t know. Finally, when they took me to the detention center, I got an agent to listen. He was the boss, Señor Jack Leary, and went to where I said,” he said. “But she wasn’t there.”

  “Oh, Roberto, no,” Julia said.

  “After I got processed and deported, I crossed back on my own. No ‘coyote,’ no one to guide me, I found my way to the same spot, the same boulder. But Rosa was gone.”

  “No!” Julia said. “Where?”

  “I have no idea. It’s five years, and I know she’s gone, but I dream of her looking for me, circling that rock and waiting for me to come back.”

  “When I first asked, you said she was in Mexico.”

  “Sometimes I hope she is,” he said. “That she survived, and she’s with a good family.”

  “What about home in Mexico? What about her mother?”

  “Her mother and I were young when Rosa was born. She left us both. Rosa doesn’t know her. My grandmother was mother to her.”

  “Wouldn’t Rosa have told someone where she was from?”

  “She was only six during the crossing. I taught her the name of our town, she knew it, but my grandmother, no one in my family, has ever heard anything.”

  “Oh God, six years old.”

  “And Jenny?” He pronounced her name “Yenny.”

  “Sixteen.”

  He took her hand then, waiting, and she felt ready to tell him.

  “She died in a car crash five years ago. With her father.”

  He held her hand tightly, waiting.

  “She was driving. It happened on our road, at the end of our driveway. She was a good driver, but she missed the turn. The police think she did it on purpose.”

  Roberto put his arms around her. She leaned against his body and smelled his sweat and let him hold her. No one had in a long time—she couldn’t stand being close to anyone—but she felt words moving between them, stories of their daughters passing from her heart to his and back.

  They were so silent she could hear moths in the night-blooming jasmine vines that grew up the house columns. Distant waves crashed on the rocks below the cliff, relentless and discordant. Julia couldn’t help doing the math, adding the years, and when she closed her eyes and leaned her head on Roberto’s shoulder, she could feel twenty-one-year old Jenny and eleven-year old Rosa sitting on the steps beside them.

  Roberto stayed for a long time. Julia didn’t want to move. The longer they sat there, the more she could feel their daughters, just like in her old dream of Luna and Maria and the man with the scar seared into his face. She glanced up at Roberto, traced his cheek with her fingers. It felt smooth, no evidence of a burn.

  “I used to have this dream,” she said. “From the time I was young. Two little girls in Mexico, always in danger, and a man nearby to protect them.”

  “There’s no one to protect . . . ,” he began.

  “But in the dream he was so real. So good. I’d feel scared for the girls . . . maybe I was one of them. But I knew he’d protect them. Us.”

  “You dreamed of Mexico?” he asked. “Why?”

  “It means something to me, to our family. Hasn’t John ever told you?”

  “Señor Riley?” he asked. “No.”

  She hesitated, debating whether to tell him her family legend—it even connected to John’s reasons for being in Ireland now—but stopped herself. The protector was just a figment of her dreams. He hadn’t helped Jenny, and he couldn’t help Rosa. Bringing him up to Roberto would just make her sound as crazy as she sometimes felt.

  A coyote called from the hills and another answered. Bonnie growled, struggled to her feet, and Roberto caught her by the collar.

  “I’d better get her inside,” Julia said.

  “Yes,” Roberto said. “Keep her safe.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said, opening the door.

  He nodded, watched until they were inside and she’d bolted the door. She watched him through the window, making his way back toward the cabin, and she waited until he’d disappeared into the shadows before turning off the porch lights.

  chapter three

  Julia

  The weeks went by slowly. Julia felt lazy and quiet, as if the molecules of her body were knitting together, healing the parts of her that had stayed so raw at home in Connecticut. As September rolled into October, she slept a lot, everywhere but in her bed: in a wicker chaise on the oceanfront terrace, on a blanket on Leo Carillo Beach.

  After their talk, she and Roberto kept their distance. She had guarded herself for so long she felt strange and exposed—not only had she told him about Jenny, she’d listened to his story about Rosa. It haunted her—not only the horror of losing her, but the fact that nothing was resolved. He’d had no body to bury, no certain knowledge of her death.

  Julia had spent a summer in the desert, south of where Roberto lost Rosa. She’d focused on that part of the world because of Uncle John, her time spent in California, her early familiarity with families who had made their way north from Central America. Meeting Roberto brought that desert time, nearly all of it spent with Jenny, back to her.

  Julia had had five years of insomnia, but this time was different. Usually she relived that last morning: breakfast with Peter and Jenny, plans for riding lessons and Super Bowl errands, the ease of it all, the astonishing ordinariness of that last day. And the truth, impossible to bear even after all this time, after the proof of it, that there had been no signs that it was the end, that life as they’d all known it was over. Jenny had smiled. Julia remembered that every sleepless night: Jenny’s pretty, tired smile at the breakfast table.

  Peter believed—or acted as if he did—that first love was no big deal, Jenny would get through it, outgrow her feelings for Timmy, learn a lesson and be stronger for it. Julia had wanted him to be supportive of Jenny—stay up talking as long as she needed, take her side against Timmy. Jenny’s heart was breaking, and she had never needed her father’s love more. Peter raced off to work every day, armed for battle with his briefcase, but at home he had seemed to lose track of what they needed. Not just Julia and Jenny, but the three of them, all together, as a family.

  Peter wanted to think Jenny was fine, that horseback riding would take her mind off the breakup. When Julia had gazed at her daughter across the table that morning, she’d expected to see dark crescents under her eyes, worry and anxiety and a wish the phone would ring, a constant vigilance, hoping and waiting for Timmy to come back. Instead she saw Jenny smiling, with something like relief.

  All those sleepless nights when Julia had remembered Jenny’s smile, she’d asked herself: if Jenny could look that way at breakfast, even for a few seconds, with laughter behind her eyes, and real humor, how was it possible for her to feel such despair just two hours later that she’d push down on the gas so hard she’d hit the wall going fifty or more?

  These last weeks in Malibu had given her moments of distraction from those thoughts. Roberto’s story about his daughter touched a soft, painful spot in Julia’s heart. It kept her awake, thinking about Rosa and where she could be. She thought of that moment, sitting with Roberto, when she’d felt Jenny right there with her.

  How close she had seemed, how real. It was almost as if the story of this little girl, separated from her father, had made Jenny materialize. Nothing in life had soothed Julia all these years, until then. She wished there was some way to help him find some comfort, too.

  That morning she got up at dawn. She fed Bonnie and stood in the cozy kitchen waiting for the coffee to finish brewing
. Staring out the window, she couldn’t even see the fountain ten yards away: the fog was so heavy it swaddled the house and every tree in the orchard, made every object invisible to everything else.

  Her aunt and uncle’s kitchen was old-fashioned in the extreme, dating back to when her uncle and father had been boys. The wooden furniture was rustic, with a few pieces painted turquoise and bright yellow to match small square floral tiles set among the larger terracotta ones.

  The stove and refrigerator were vintage Maytag, eggshell enamel with rounded corners. Open shelves above the tiled sink were stacked with red, blue, and green pottery plates and bowls. Ornately tooled, tarnished silver trays were displayed on a hutch containing cookware and drawers of silver flatware.

  Julia stood in front of the corner bookcase. Floor to ceiling, it contained cookbooks and plastic three-ring binders. While Bonnie finished her breakfast, Julia stood with her coffee mug staring at the books. They covered decades, if not a whole century—some looked glossy and brand-new, others had titles worn away by time and salt air—and many were in foreign languages.

  Julia knew, from previous visits, that the entire kitchen library concerned lemons. There were texts on the design and maintenance of lemon orchards. She found art books with drawings and paintings of lemons by Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Cassatt, Sargent, Velásquez, and Goya.

  There was a whole shelf devoted to women surrealist painters, mostly Mexican, who had painted lemons: Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. There were histories, novels, and, especially, cookbooks with “lemon” in assorted languages in the title: limón, citron, limão, citrom, λεμοvı, limone, cytryna, and more.

  Julia first gravitated to technical books regarding structure and design of citrus groves, and Chumash Indian sites uncovered during construction—abalone shells covered with red ochre ceremonial paint, petroglyphs carved into a rock ledge, a steatite boiling stone.

  She reached for a well-worn cookbook. Its cloth cover had been green with gold leaf lettering, but age had turned it all brown. She turned the pages, saw her grandmother’s fine handwriting on the flyleaf and in the margins.

  Standing there, she felt the desire to make something simple that would taste delicious—Jenny had loved baking. Julia’s skin tingled, as if Jenny were right there with her, helping her come up with a plan to help Roberto and Rosa. She glanced outside, looking for him, but the fog was still too thick to see.

  “Come on, Bon,” she said. “Let’s go out.”

  Bonnie seemed to smile—she always looked that way, happy, her tongue hanging out. Julia clipped on the leash, slipped a canvas bag over her shoulder. The air was damp, but not cold like New England fog: beneath the slight chill, she felt the land’s warmth pulling the water droplets straight off the ocean. The sun hadn’t risen over the mountains, but the day’s light permeated the marine layer and turned it silver.

  She and Bonnie walked through the orchard, circling toward the barn and Roberto’s cabin along the old rutted, unpaved service road. Walking in the ghostly mist, she felt Jenny’s presence. A rabbit scampered across their path, and Bonnie let out a sharp bark.

  The ranch trucks were parked in the turnaround, but she didn’t see Roberto’s old black Toyota Tundra. For a moment her heart sank, but then she heard the barn door creak open. She turned, smiling, expecting to see him.

  “Hola, miss,” Serapio said.

  “Good morning,” Julia said. “How are you?”

  “I am fine,” he said.

  “Is Roberto here?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “He worked many days in a row. With the fog and no wind, he take today to go home.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, disappointed.

  “Is there something I can help with?”

  “No thanks,” she said. Starting to walk away, she paused. Baking muffins would prolong the sense of Jenny being with her, and she’d do anything to hold on to that.

  “I’d like to borrow one of the lemon pickers,” she said.

  Serapio disappeared into the barn, returned a moment later with a long extendable pole that had a clipper and small basket at the top end. “When the rest of the crew comes, we can pick as many lemons as you want,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” Julia said. “I used to be pretty good at it when I was young. Let’s see how I do now.”

  Serapio laughed, as if he could see no point in a grown woman wanting to pick lemons when she had an entire crew at her disposal. She walked through sheets of gray cloud, the gnarled and twisted trees lining the path, their bitter fruit hanging low on the boughs. She dropped the leash to pluck the first lemon.

  Another rabbit darted into the brush, but Bonnie pretended not to see. Her arthritis was too bad, and even without the excuse of the leash tugging at her throat, she didn’t want to bother giving chase to an animal she had no hope of catching.

  Roberto

  Roberto Rodriguez lived in the back apartment of his father’s house, on North Boyle Avenue. He didn’t have a particular day off, but when the winds weren’t blowing he put Serapio in charge and returned home to see his family. Family was everything to Roberto, the reason he had come to the United States in the first place. It seemed confusing, considering how much he missed the grandmother who had raised him—and Rosa—and all his tíos and primos in the village where he’d grown up, but he was here for them. The money he sent home helped them to survive. His grandma had cancer, and his tía took her to the hospital for treatment every week.

  He stripped off his dusty clothes, took a shower. The walls were thin, and even with the water running he could hear the La Reina del Sur on television in his father’s house. He dried off, pulled on fresh jeans and a white T-shirt. By habit he splashed on Polo cologne and walked outside to enter through the front door.

  “Hola, Esperanza,” he said to his father’s wife, and leaned down to give her a kiss.

  “Su papá está durmiendo,” she said, giving him a hug, then returning to her knitting and the TV show.

  Roberto nodded. He sat on the couch opposite Esperanza and settled down to wait. Even now, at thirty-five years old, the idea of seeing his father warmed him. Roberto was his own man, no question, and there was only one opinion he cared about in this world. His father had left Mexico when Roberto was five, to come to the States in search of a better life.

  His father’s snores, coming from the bedroom—the only other room in the apartment besides the kitchen—comforted him. The room was dark; the day was getting hot, and Esperanza had closed the curtains to keep out the sun. The yellow walls were hung with old photos—of Roberto’s father as a young man, of Esperanza and her mother, of Roberto’s grandmother, of Roberto himself, and of Rosa. A statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe stood in the corner surrounded by candles, but Esperanza lit them only on Sundays and holidays.

  The darkness and the sounds of his father’s snoring, Esperanza’s knitting needles clicking, and the voices on TV lulled Roberto. He felt tired from too many days without a break, and he stared at Rosa’s photo. It had been taken at school, first grade, just before they’d begun their journey north. His grandmother had saved it and sent it to Roberto once he’d reached L.A.

  The airless room and the droning noise made his eyes heavy. He remembered the first time his father left. He felt as if the world had ended. Without his father there to help him and kiss him good night, he thought he had disappeared—not just his father, but Roberto himself. He would walk to school, but he couldn’t learn, or more that he didn’t want to, and anything that seeped into his mind happened accidentally. All he could think of was the empty hole where he and his father used to be.

  He worked hard in the fields, before and after school. His hands were covered with calluses, and his feet hurt because his boots were too small and they couldn’t afford bigger ones. In
spite of the money his father sent home, the family never had quite enough to eat. Roberto grew tall, and he was very thin. At eleven he was ashamed of his height. The fact the kids called him Flaco—skinny—didn’t help.

  Every other year his father would return. On those occasions Roberto came back to life. He could feel the excitement in the house building. His grandmother would have gotten word somehow, and the smells of good food cooking would fill the house. She didn’t even have to tell Roberto; he knew by the way the worry lines around her eyes and mouth softened. His tías—sisters of his father—would show up with food, and everyone would wait.

  No one waited better than Roberto. He would go to the edge of town, where the only road from Puebla came in, and he would sit on a rock and watch for dust in the distance, a sign that a car or bus was approaching. His heart would skip beats, more and more, till he could barely breathe. Then he would see his father’s face in the window of his uncle’s car or the big blue bus, and he’d jump up and follow it all the way to his grandma’s house, dying to be the first one to greet his father as he stepped onto the yard.

  “Papá,” he called his father. It was confusing, because when his father was away, he also called his grandfather “Papá.” It was almost like having two fathers—one who was there, and the real one who was only there sometimes. The real one was Roberto’s king. His father would hug and kiss everyone, give small presents he had brought back from L.A., maybe something extra special like a dress for his grandmother, and then they would all have dinner.

  There would be candles and music, best of all some kind of meat, not just beans and rice. His grandfather liked to drink, so there would be cerveza, and after many beers his grandfather would get mean and start saying things like “Why don’t you send more money? Are you spending it on women? You leave your son here and we have to raise him, the least you can do is send us enough money.”